Targeted to students in Grade 3, but able to be modified to accommodate students in Grades 2, 4, and 5,
Real People, Real Lives: Biographies of Presidents
will help young learners examine key aspects of the lives of a president through a biographical lens. This study will be achieved through hands–on research culminating in written essays and informative oral presentations. Students will also delve into the world of historical fiction working in literature circle groups to examine historical fiction that coincides with the time period that their researched person lived. As an extension activity, students may be paired up to create fictional conversations and interactions that might have happened in the lives of the presidents that they have studied.
The unit will introduce students to all important research skills. Although students are new to research and will need a good deal of modeling, they will be expected to acquire research skills for both print sources (for example, books and articles) and non-print sources (such as websites). They will be required to access and evaluate information and, with minimal help, be able to choose relevant facts among those they read. Students will learn note-taking strategies which will be used to write an expository essay. We will utilize graphic organizers and rubrics will be created which will take student input into account. There will be modifications in graphic organizers and level of independence for those students with special needs. At the end of the unit, students will present their final projects in the form of a research paper and oral presentation.
The research the students will be doing will also allow them to establish a foundation on which to build while exploring the worlds of nonfiction and fiction that is set in historical times. Students will be able to extend their research beyond the president whom they are investigating to include the time period when the person served and/or lived. As an extension activity, students will be encouraged to write an historical narrative piece that would coincide with the time that their famous person lived. This type of activity lends itself to the reading of many interesting historical fiction pieces that would hopefully pique students' interests. The biographies and historical fiction stories that are read will foster connections for my students with people from history in a way that reading an historical textbook mostly likely would not.
As a springboard activity, in a whole group setting, I will model with the class how to research a president using George Washington as our focus. Ideally, I will partner up with another teacher who will research Barack Obama. These are two presidents that most students seem to be familiar with and so it will be a good introduction to how to go about finding information through research and not just using what you know or think you know about a person. Students from both classes will then be filling in the middle with research on the presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama. We will use key questions and incorporate both print material as well as websites to fill in a graphic organizer before constructing an essay and first person oral presentation. At each stage of our unit, we will refer back to our whole group study. Upon completion of independent research and writing, students will work with partners on editing, proofreading, and revising, in order to produce a finished product to share with our school community.
